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What do you do when Windows won’t even boot?

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Shattered tempered glass still in the frame Several jobs ago I did some phone tech support, and I have been the official “computer guy” for friends and family for as long as I can remember.  This means I have spent far more hours of my life trying to resuscitate dying PCs than I’d like to admit.

My brother’s computer has gone belly up and he’d like to get photos and other important files off his old hard drive.  I thought I’d share my thoughts with the rest of the world as well.

So, something is preventing Windows from even booting.  I’m not there to make an in-depth diagnosis, but it could be due to some corruption on your hard drive or some other strange hiccup with the files that are important to Windows.  You really have three options:

1.  Try to figure out what’s wrong and fix Windows.  This is time consuming, frustrating, and might not be possible in the end.
Pros:  Maybe it will be easy to fix and you’ll be back to work, right where you left off.
Cons:  Most likely it will be a huge pain and there’s a good chance you won’t be able to get it working.

2.  Buy a new hard drive, install it in your old computer, then install a new copy of Windows and important apps.  Now plug in your old hard drive as a second drive so you can copy files off of it.  Make sure you pull photos and other important files first, since it’s possible your old hard drive is failing and will eventually just die.
Pros:  A new hard drive isn’t too expensive, this is a good option if your computer is relatively new and fast and you don’t want to toss it.
Cons:  You have to waste a bunch of time installing Windows and whatever other software you need.

3.  Buy a hard drive enclosure, put your old hard drive in it, and then plug it in to a new computer and/or laptop so you can copy files off of it.  Again, make sure you pull photos and other important files first.  This is a good option if you already have a new computer lying around or if your old computer was getting slow and obsolete and you want to get a new one anyway.
Pros:  Hard drive enclosures are pretty cheap.  You can plug your old hard drive in just about anywhere to get your files.
Cons:  If you don’t happen to have another computer sitting around (or weren’t planning on buying one) this is the most expensive option.

Of course, if this is your work PC, you have a fourth option – give it to your company’s desktop support and let them deal with it.

And no matter which option you pick, remember that it’s only a matter of time before your computer has some sort of problem, so figure out a way to backup everything you really need.

Update to Altocumulus WordPress Tagging Plugin – version 0.2

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Screenshot of my tag cloud WordPress plugin in action

Everyone has tag clouds all over the web, but are they really useful?  Altocumulus is an attempt to use tag clouds as a real navigational system in WordPress blogs.

Install the plugin and it will automatically put a cloud of related tags at the top of all your Category and Tag pages.  Hopefully this will serve two purposes:

  1. Users who end up on a general category page can click through to a more specific (or more relevant) tag page, and
  2. It should give users a general idea of the topic of the posts on that archive page, increasing the information scent.

Next version I’ll add an options screen where you can change the number of tags, placement, etc.

Please drop me a note if you run into any bugs or are using it on your blog.  Let me know if you have any ideas you’d like to see implemented, too – I am all about implementing and studying folksonomies.  The more folks who are interested, the more likely I am to add features.  Thanks.

Download the Plugin Here

Obsolescence and obscurity in digital cameras

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University Hall Tower at OWU I’m planning on buying a new DSLR, and as I looked through old photos from college today I started to think about my first digital camera, a Philips ESP50.  Here’s a page with some specs, translated from German.

I remember buying the camera, logged in to eBay from my parents’ house late at night the day after Christmas.  I think I ended up paying something like $250 for it.

This was before the megapixel war, when 640 by 480 was considered a viable resolution.  This camera applied tortuous levels of JPG compression to fit images on the 4MB disk.  At the time, though, it seemed like a good deal.  Film cost money, and developing film cost money, and most of the year I was a ramen-noodle-eating college student.  Probably the biggest reason to go digital was the tiny little screen on the back – you could actually tell if you got the shot, instead of waiting to get back a bunch of blurry prints.

The camera is painfully obsolete now, and even then it was somewhat obscure.  The thing is, the Web was a pretty amazing place even back in 1998 – there were lots of web pages about this camera.  I remember reading at least a couple reviews, and searches for it on WebCrawler or Alta Vista or whatever I used back then came up with retailers, other auction sites, etc.  Look for information about this camera now, and it seems that it has been largely forgotten:

And that’s about it.

I wonder, is this the destiny of all cameras?  Will I do a search for my Nikon Coolpix 5700 in 2014 and come up with just as little, or has the Web expanded so quickly that the copious product reviews, blog posts, and technical discussions on photography forums outweigh the force of entropy?  I wonder if the Internet has gained any stability as it has matured – do pages tend to stick around longer, or is linkrot a constant of the universe?

Future generations will hardly feel deprived if they miss out on information about some crappy old digicam.  Still, you never know what kind of information will end up being useful to someone at some point, and this same problem extends to all the information on the Web – from reviews of obsolete products to the human genome.  If a website goes under and deletes a thousand blogs, it won’t exactly make the news.  But our great-grandchildren might look at that stuff the way we look at letters from the Civil War.

The only solutions I have are more effort behind projects like archive.org, increased data portability, and rational intellectually property laws that don’t make saving 70-year-old content from deletion into a federal crime.

For discussion, how do you deal with ancient equipment, keeping around old web content, or even archiving old email?